Biography of Guy de Maupassant, Father of the Short Story

On July 6, 1893, Guy de Maupassant, French author, died at the age of 42. An excerpt from the article:

"From 1870-71, Guy de Maupassant served in the French Army. He then became a government clerk.

He moved from Normandy to Paris after the war, and after leaving his clerkship in the French Navy he worked for several prominent French newspapers. In 1880, Flaubert published one of his most famous short stories "Boule du Suif," about a prostitute pressured to provide her services to a Prussian officer.

Perhaps his best-known work, "The Necklace," tells the story of Mathilde, a working-class girl who borrows a necklace from a wealthy friend when she attends a high society party. Mathilde loses the necklace and works the rest of her life to pay for it, only discovering years later that it was a worthless piece of costume jewelry. Her sacrifices had been for nothing.

This theme of a working-class person unsuccessfully trying to rise above their station was common in de Maupassant's stories.

Even though his writing career spanned barely a decade, Flaubert was prolific, writing some 300 short stories, three plays, six novels, and hundreds of newspaper articles. The commercial success of his writing made Flaubert famous and independently wealthy."